1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to electronic communication and, more particularly, to electronic communication to or within a group.
2. Description of the Related Art
Current computer systems generally include many communication applications and tools. Each communication application generally performs a single type of communication and a user frequently must launch each application or tool individually, even when multiple applications or tools are required for a single communication task.
When a user needs to communicate with a particular person, he may have to open several different communication applications, each of which maintains its own set of contact information, in order to determine an appropriate communication mechanism for communicating with the desired recipient. Additionally, duplicate information for a single person may be maintained by more than one communication application. When contact information for such a person changes, the user generally must remember that more than one application maintains information about that person and manually update the information in each application. The number of human errors that may occur when manually updating multiple copies of contact information often results in two different communication applications including different versions of contact information for a single person.
Furthermore, the contact lists of each communication application must be searched separately and individually, since generally different communication applications cannot search each other's contact lists. Communication applications often have limited capabilities to sort or search through contact information. Therefore, locating contacts often requires a user to manually sort or search contact information in several applications.
Different communication applications frequently present different user interfaces to the user and consequently there is no unified interface for viewing and accessing communication related information. A user generally has to learn the user interface for each communication application individually and frequently more than one user interface is required to perform communication related tasks.
Traditionally, a user wishing to communicate with a group of contacts must determine a specific mechanism for communicating with each contact. Frequently, different communication channels must be used to communicate with different members of the group. For example, one person may only be available via instant messaging, while another may only be available via email. Thus, a sender wishing to communicate with the entire group may have to utilize several different communication applications in order to communicate the same information to every member of the group.
Additionally, one or more members of the target group may use multiple communication channels, such as both home and office email and instant messaging. Determining the most appropriate communication mechanism through which to contact a single individual may be difficult and time consuming. Determining appropriate communication mechanisms for each member of a group greatly increases both the difficulty to and time required to communicate with the entire group.
One traditional method of electronically communicating information to a group of contacts is to place the information, such as a document, in a shared location to which all of the contacts have access and to then notify each contact regarding the location of the shared information. However, the sender must still determine how to send the notification and location information to each contact. Thus, this solution merely moves the difficulty from communicating the actual information to communicating the notification regarding the information. Alternatively, a group of contacts may all be required to use the same communication mechanism (e.g. everyone in the group must use email) in order to facilitate group communication. However, forcing everyone to use a single communication mechanism is frequently too limiting to be practical.